November 2012
Altera Corporation
Arria V GZ Hard IP for PCI Express
1. Arria V GZ Datasheet
This document describes both the Altera
®
Arria
®
V GZ Hard IP for PCI Express
®
and
Avalon
®
-MM Arria V GZ Hard IP for PCI Express MegaCore functions. PCI Express is
a high-performance interconnect protocol for use in a variety of applications
including network adapters, storage area networks, embedded controllers, graphic
accelerator boards, and audio-video products. The PCI Express protocol is software
backwards-compatible with the earlier PCI and PCI-X protocols, but is significantly
different from its predecessors. It is a packet-based, serial, point-to-point interconnect
between two devices. The performance is scalable based on the number of lanes and
the generation that is implemented. Altera offers a configurable hard IP block in Arria
V GZ devices for both Endpoints and Root Ports that is compliant with
. Using a configurable hard IP block, rather than programmable
logic, saves significant FPGA resources. The hard IP block is available in ×1, ×2, ×4,
and ×8 configurations.
shows the aggregate bandwidth of a PCI Express
link for Gen1, Gen2, and Gen3 for 1, 4, and 8 lanes. The protocol specifies 2.5 giga-
transfers per second for Gen1, 5 giga-transfers per second for Gen2, and 8.0
giga-transfers per second for Gen3.
provides bandwidths for a single
transmit (TX) or receive (RX) channel, so that the numbers in
double for
duplex operation. Gen1 and Gen2 use 8B/10B encoding which introduces a 20%
overhead. In contrast, Gen3 uses 128b/130b encoding which reduces the data
throughput lost to encoding to less than 1%.
f
PCI Express High Performance Reference Design
calculating bandwidth for the hard IP implementation of PCI Express in many Altera
FPGAs.
Features
The Arria V GZ Hard IP for PCI Express and the Avalon-MM Arria V GZ Hard IP for
PCI Express IP cores support the following key features:
■
Complete protocol stack including the Transaction, Data Link, and Physical Layers
implemented as hard IP.
■
Feature rich:
■
Support for ×1, ×2, ×4, and ×8 configurations with Gen1, Gen2, or Gen3 lane
Table 1–1. PCI Express Data Throughput
Link Width
×1
×2
×4
×8
PCI Express Gen1 (2.5 Gbps)
2
4
8
16
PCI Express Gen2 (5.0 Gbps)
4
8
16
32
PCI Express Gen3 (8.0 Gbps)
7.87
15.75
31.51
63
November 2012
UG-01097-1.4